lynx-dev A bug in the keymap handling?

[Keith Doyle]

Hi, 

I think I may have found a bug in KEYMAP handling.

I've never been quite satisfied with the choice of movement characters 
in Lynx. In particular, I would rather the arrow keys all do what you 
would intuit they do and that is to move up down left and right through 
the active links. What the up left and right do bothers me a little,
but the down drives me nuts.  

I see a link low on the page that I want to get to, and think
"down" and hit the down key like I would in any other text oriented
application I've ever seen, and find it instead goes to the right and 
takes forever to get down to the link as it horizontally cycles through 
the arrays of links that are on most pages.  So someone pointed out the '>' 
key which does more like what I want (not quite, but better than the default
down key).  I then find out that since it is a printable character, it has 
the side-effect of getting hung up when you encounter an entry field as it 
starts entering >>>>'s into the field.  So I looked into the keymap 
configuration in the .lynx.cfg file.  I decided to try swapping the down 
arrow with the '>' key in the hopes it would fix the problem of 
encountering input fields while doing a down: 

        KEYMAP:>:NEXT_LINK     # Move to the next link 
        KEYMAP:0x101:DOWN_LINK # Move to the link below 
        
I'm using version 2.8.1rel2, and the above did work.  However it has an 
annoying side effect on the Enter key, which apparently is tied to whatever 
the DOWN key is configured to do and not to its own isolated function.  
And as far as I have been able to tell the Enter key does not have it's 
own keymap code.  In any event, I don't want to change the behavior of 
Enter, only of the down arrow.

After making the above change, when using enter in an input field, it does 
the equivalent of a DOWN_LINK when it used to do the equivalent of NEXT_LINK.

So I thought, what would happen to Enter if you modified the down arrow
to do something unrelated?  I then modified it to do a QUIT, and sure enough,
when you hit Enter from an input field, it asks you if you want to QUIT. 
This seems like a bug, as it makes redefinition of the down arrow key next 
to useless.  I know that on some keyboards, the down arrow sends the same 
code as Enter (Wyse 50? Wyse 60?  I forget.), but that seems like a poor 
reason to impair the interface of the great majority of users out there 
who are using terminals or terminal emulators that *do* differentiate between 
the down arrow and Enter key, and both Terminfo and Termcap have unique
definitions for the DOWN key.

Anyone else agree that this is a bug?



And while I'm at it:

Even if this Enter key side effect didn't occur, the UP_LINK and DOWN_LINK 
functions themselves aren't quite what I'd like to see-- they have odd
characteristics that seem to be defined by what was easier to program, not
by what users would normally expect.  For example, given the following links:

       link_1 link_2 link_3 link4 link_5 
       link_6 link_7 link_8 link9 link_10 

If you are on link_3 and do a DOWN_LINK, you end up at link_6 instead of link_8.
And if you are on link_8 and do an UP_LINK you end up on link_5 instead of 
link_3.  DOWN_LINK from link_1 takes you to link_6, but up_link from link_6 
takes you to link_5 so they are not inverses of each other as a user would
normally expect.  Are there any plans to make any of these areas better?



Keith Doyle
address@hidden